Beta'd by Anjirika.
Chapter 4 - Dreams Versus Reality
Although she didn't like to admit it, Rose was always a little nervous when she got separated from the Doctor, especially on undercover work. She looked around the room she had been given, wondering how well she would be able to fit in under the close scrutiny of a roommate.
Fortunately for Rose, when Jenny showed up in the room later that evening, she was delighted to learn Rose had joined the housekeeping staff a week into the term. Not only would Rose be helping to fill a two-person vacancy, but they took to each other right away - despite the fact that Rose told her she was only going to be there for a few months.
"Brace yerself," Jenny warned Rose the next morning, as she stood outside of one of the teacher's rooms holding a breakfast tray. "Professor Grinton's the closest to the kitchens, so he gets his food either first or last. But he starts classes too early to be last."
With that she knocked on the door, and stepped into the darkened rooms.
"Mornin', Professor," Jenny said cheerily, with a wink towards Rose. Jenny set the tray down on his desk, then motioned to Rose to get the curtains on the far side of the room.
The Professor, or what Rose assumed was the Professor, growled from beneath the bed covers. "Morning!" he replied angrily. "You call this morning? Barely twilight at all. Not even a rooster's call. Why..."
He went on like that the entire time the girls were in the room.
When they finished, Jenny closed the door with a bright, "Have a good day, Professor!"
His "Harrumph," followed them down the hall.
As they pushed the breakfast cart to the next room, Jenny told Rose, "Don't let 'im get to ya. He grouches like a bear, but he always takes the tray, don't he?"
Rose very quickly got the hang of the breakfast routine. Jenny let Rose take the lead, following along only to supervise and to introduce her to the teachers - to those teachers who bothered with the names of the maid service, anyway.
Even though it would only be Rose's second day on the job, Jenny said that tomorrow they could split the rooms fifty-fifty, and get it all done in half the time.
When they got to John Smith's door, Rose took the tray with a smile. "C'mon," she invited Jenny. "This time, I get to introduce you."
The doors of the Blue Box opened, and a dazzling, golden light poured out. A figure stepped out from the midst of the light, somehow dimming it with her own brilliance. Golden hair and golden eyes...
"You're gonna burn," the Doctor warned her, lamenting.
Rose looked at him then, the gold dimming slightly to reveal tear-filled brown eyes. "I want you safe," she told him. "My Doctor."
The room shifted around her, constricting to a much narrower corridor. The all-around glow had faded, but Rose still seemed golden.
"It's alive," she told him, supporting herself against the wall of the corridor. She was struggling, as if in pain, but held her hand out in warning when he tried to step closer to her. "It's alive..."
"Rose," the Doctor begged, "what are you talking about?"
"The sun's alive!" she sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks from her still-closed eyes. She braced herself with both hands against the wall of the corridor and choked out the words, "They scooped out its heart, and now it's screamin'!"
Another woman spoke up. "What do you mean? How can a sun be alive?" she asked, incredulous. She turned to the Doctor. "Why's she saying that?"
The Doctor couldn't answer. His entire focus was on Rose, as she turned towards them.
"'Cause it's livin' in me," she cried, at last opening her eyes, golden and burning.
John awoke with a start, his single heart beating fast enough to make up for the Doctor's two. He had just time enough to recognize his new rooms in the dim light, before the door opened and Rose stepped in, followed by another maid.
Rose, perfectly herself, brunette and brown-eyed.
Even as memories of the golden dream-Rose began to fade, he came more fully to himself, ashamed - well, maybe more embarrassed - to have been dreaming about her. It was hardly proper, even considering how long he'd known her...
Rose balanced the breakfast tray on her hip, knocking with her free hand. "Mr. Smith?" she called as she opened the door.
He looked so much like the Doctor she thought, propped up in bed on his elbows, with a familiar, relieved smile on his face, and wearing the same old stripy jim-jams. The TARDIS must have packed them for him.
His eyes widened and his smile dimmed after a moment of looking at her. He leapt out of bed, scrambling for his dressing gown.
"I did knock," Rose semi-apologized. She tried to hide her smirk as she set down the breakfast tray.
John's babbling, it turned out, was far less technical than the Doctor's, and more self-conscious. "Yes, yes, of course," he said. "My fault. I'll try to be more presentable next time. No time for a lie in, it's a school day after all, yes."
Rose's day progressed, scrubbing floors, eating a small, hurried lunch with Jenny and the other staff, cleaning the boys' dormitories, bringing tea to the teacher's rooms, dusting, washing windows. Rose collapsed on her bed at dinner time, but Jenny wasn't going to have it.
"C'mon," she said. "Get changed, an' we'll head into the village. It's Friday, an' yer first day, and dinner's on me."
Rose thought she'd really like to stop in at the pub, but that apparently wasn't tolerated.
After dinner, Rose told Jenny she was too tired to stay out, but would be fine heading back on her own. She took a little detour, following the road out through the woods to the little shed where the TARDIS was hidden. She just had to stop in to say hello to the ship.
It was eerie, seeing the console room so dark. It reminded her of when they'd fallen through to the parallel world, Pete's world.
Rose walked around the console, telling the TARDIS about her first day, letting her know that John Smith was oblivious and inconspicuous, just like he should be.
Her hopes of maybe sneaking back sometime to sleep in her own room were dashed when she found that the corridor off of the console room had disappeared.
"Three months," Rose consoled, as much to the TARDIS as to herself. "Three more months, and it's back to the stars."
TWO MONTHS LATER...
John Smith awoke in the pre-dawn light of an ordinary Thursday morning to much more cluttered rooms than the ones he'd first occupied upon his arrival at the school. He had not been moved, but books were now piled on almost every horizontal surface, papers stuffed in folders here and there.
John wrapped himself in his dressing gown and sat down at his desk. He lit a lamp, opened a leather-bound journal to a blank page near the middle, and began to draw.
Of all his dreams, he had come to savor the ones of Rose the most. None of the Doctor's previous adventures had the capacity to make his hearts swell in such an overwhelming manner.
Heart, not hearts, John mentally corrected himself. Two hearts; such a strange concept.
He traced the moons in the sky, contemplating whether to invest in watercolors. It was the blue and violet hues, after all, that he had most wanted to show her.
The couple on the grass below came next. The jacket was just large enough to sit on, the Doctor leaning back on his hands, Rose pressed close to his side.
John was still surprised at how he could imagine her with a man with an entirely different face from his own, without a hint of jealousy.
He drew them from behind, imagining how they must have looked to an outsider - for while he was the Doctor in his dreams, John Smith was very much a human, and so far removed from the impossible adventures in his mind.
With the last few strokes, John finished the drawing, scrawling in a name: Delta Magna. He had no inkling as to the meaning of the phrase, aside from its literal Greek and Latin origins, but he knew that it somehow fit with the scene.
He sat, looking at the drawing, such an inadequate representation of his dream.
Of Rose.
For two months he had been keeping a respectful, professional distance. Two months of breakfasts and teas, making small talk, exchanging pleasantries when they passed in the corridors. Occasionally, he had been able to talk to her for just a little longer than normal if a mutually-interesting topic came up, usually something from their common past.
He looked again at his dream-Rose. An increasingly small voice in his head railed against the impropriety, but a stronger, ever-growing voice hailed their teacher-and-servant arrangement as an opportunity. He simply had to find it within himself to approach her, to build upon their friendship. And maybe, if she would allow it, they could pursue something more.
His hearts' desire, John thought, then corrected himself: heart's desire.
A glance at his clock told him Rose would be by soon with his breakfast. He blotted the drawing, slipped it back into its place in his desk, then stood to get ready for a new day.
When Rose did arrive, she didn't seem as cheerful as John had gotten used to seeing her. In fact, she seemed angry.
"Is anything the matter, Rose?" he asked as she moved about the room, violently throwing back the curtains, stacking books with much more force than necessary.
"Course not," she denied, not looking at him.
She moved to the hearth, kicking a few stray bits of charred wood under the grate, poking mercilessly at the glowing embers.
She set the poker back in its stand, then spun towards him. "It's just," she announced, "every mornin' for two months, it's serve him breakfast with a smile, while he does nothin' but complain about how early it is. Then, for once, I try and make a special trip in the middle of everythin'. I go all the way back to the kitchens, just to bring him his breakfast a little later, and what do I get?" She made vicious quotation marks in the air with her fingers. "'It's cold.'"
The tirade put John a little off his form, but he gathered himself enough to ask, "Who's this, then?"
"Grinton," Rose ground out. She sighed. "Sorry, Professor Grinton." She composed herself, turning away and brushing her hand affectionately over the fob watch on the mantelpiece before continuing around the room. "He just doesn't like me wakin' him up, no matter what I do. Just forget it."
John was surprised. "Who wouldn't want to wake up to you?" he asked, before the words fully registered with his mind.
Rose turned back to him, as the implications of his question hit him fully.
"Eh, um, that is, well, what I mean is that you could come here first, if you liked. I'm rather an early riser, and, uh -"
Rose laughed, and even though it was at his expense, John was proud to have instigated it. "'S okay," Rose told him, opening the last set of curtains more gently. "I think I'd rather save the best for last."
She was smiling at him, and he was grinning back at her, and all thoughts of anything else he should have been trying to say to her had fled John's mind completely.
"'Sides," she added, hefting the pile of books that needed to go back to the library, "Least it's only once a month that I've gotta play dinner lady..."
With that last, utterly undecipherable comment, she left him to his breakfast.
Ages ago, Rose had sat in a chippy railing against even the possibility of returning to a normal life. But here she was, working day in and day out, as if she were a shop girl again. And it really was like working in a shop. The customers - meaning the boys and the teachers staff - either ignored her outright, or smiled politely before proceeding to ignore her.
Except for John, of course.
Leave it to the Doctor to have his humanized, physical form babysat by someone as sweet and oblivious as John Smith.
Rose often wondered how much of John was the Doctor shining through, and how much was what the TARDIS had written into him. Most of the time, he was the picture of a 1913 history teacher: his hands clasped behind his back, and his head in the clouds. But with her, he seemed different.
She wanted to believe his attachment to her meant that there was more of the Doctor in him than just his looks. The Doctor had told her that the real him was in the watch. John Smith was just a fiction, meant not to stand out. But Rose missed the Doctor, and she couldn't talk to a watch.
Still, in the past two months, John had never given her any reason to suspect there was more to himself than he let on. She would just have to continue torturing herself with the sight of him, and wait a few more weeks to get her Doctor back.
John was making his way to his after-lunch class, when he caught sight of Rose and... Jenny, yes, Jenny, scrubbing the floor ahead of him. They were thoroughly engrossed in their task and in their conversation, and did not notice his approach.
"That's mad," Jenny said to Rose. "Even if I could get outta here, where'd I go?"
"What if you could go anywhere?" Rose asked her.
"I don't know anywhere," Jenny countered.
"Why not everywhere, then?" Rose asked. "What if you could travel the world, and to other worlds, out into the stars?"
John's heart leapt. He heard Jenny laughing behind him, but missed the rest of their conversation as he walked on.
Would Rose... did she... could she... If she really thought that way, perhaps he didn't have to hide. John wondered what might possibly happen if he told her of his dreams.
When Rose brought his afternoon tea, he found his resolve crumbling. With every smile she gave him, he worried what it would be like to lose it, should he frighten her away. He wasn't sure what he did say to her, while she made her brief circuit of his room, straightening up before she returned to her duties.
Finally, the words just spilled out.
"Rose?" he asked, gaining her attention. "I overheard you speaking with Jenny in the corridor earlier today," he admitted.
"What about?" she asked, distractedly.
"Well," he paused, the last chance to check himself before he admitted it... "travelling to the stars, I believe you said."
Rose straightened, biting her lip, and suddenly her face was closed off to him.
John panicked. He hadn't even mentioned his dreams, and he was already losing her. But, maybe that was the problem. She thought he didn't share her imagination. "It's fascinating, really," he insisted.
To his relief, his Rose was instantly back, smiling at him. "Fascinating?" she asked, picking up some more library books and heading towards the door.
"Well, yes," he admitted, following her. "The possibility of reaching other worlds, it's rather inspiring, don't you think?"
She had a strange, but not unfriendly look on her face as they stepped out into the corridor. "Ya think a person could really, I dunno, travel to other planets, maybe?" she asked right back.
He was on the verge of an emphatic yes, and had the sudden urge to take her hand and ask her to travel with him, when the headmaster and another teacher made to pass them by.
"Travel to other planets?" the headmaster inquired. "What's this, then, Smith?"
John had not a single clue as to what forced his mouth open in the reply, "Other planets? Oh, how fantastic. Good afternoon, Headmaster, Mr. Louis. Miss Tyler."
Alone in his rooms a moment later, John banged his head back against the closed door.
How dare he, Rose thought to herself for the hundredth time, as she closed the door on the second-to-last teacher's room the next morning. All afternoon and evening, she had been fuming, just hoping to find him alone.
After two months of searching for the Doctor, he finally gave her a hint... and then cowered back in the face of the other teachers.
Rose picked up the last breakfast tray from the cart, and knocked on the door labeled. "J. Smith". He would learn to regret it. Whether he learned it now, or when he "woke up" in a few weeks, that remained to be seen.
"Mornin' Mr. Smith," she said coolly, as she entered the room and set his tray down. She took a satisfied last look at the sliced pears before moving off to tidy up.
"Rose," he greeted, but something in his voice made her stop. He was sitting, dressed in his suit and gown. He looked awful.
"What's wrong, John?" she asked.
He laughed a sad, little laugh, and said, "I am."
Rose's mind raced. What had happened? Was he dying? Was the chameleon arch not meant to transform a person for two whole months? "Whaddya mean, you are?" she asked him.
He stood from his chair and approached her, resolutely. He didn't look sick, as far as she could tell in the dim light. He took her hands. Once again, she was surprised at their warmth, but accepted the contact gratefully.
"Tell me what's wrong," she begged.
"I'm a coward," he bit out, staring at his feet. "I meant to... yesterday, I was honestly... but I don't know what got into me," he stammered. "Years of training and convention... I was suffocating and... I took the easy way out." He looked into her eyes. "I'm so sorry," he concluded.
Rose slumped back into a chair with a relieved sigh. He was just apologizing. "'S okay," she told him.
John crouched down to her level. "Are you alright?" he asked.
"Just had me worried there for a minute, is all," Rose told him. "I'm fine."
"Well, good, good," he said. After a moment, he crossed the room and opened the curtains behind his desk. "Because, well, I was hoping I might be able to make it up to you." He reached into a drawer, and pulled out a leather-bound book. "I don't want to alarm you," he said, coming back to her, not realizing he was doing just that with his words, "but I thought you might be interested."
He didn't hand her the book, but stood beside her, looking at it.
"I have these dreams, sometimes," he said. "Well, almost every night. I dream I'm this..." and, finally, a sort of light came into his eyes, and the beginnings of a smile appeared. "I dream I'm this adventurer, this... daredevil - a madman."
Rose stood, entranced. Was there a chance he remembered?
"'The Doctor', I'm called," he told her. Rose's heart soared. "And you're there, as my... companion," he added.
He remembered! Rose wanted to shout. Her Doctor was in there, somewhere.
He was smiling at her, and searching her eyes for something. "Ah, it's funny how dreams slip away," he said, then looked down at the book in his hands. "But I have written down some of these dreams, in the form of fiction... um..." he laughed a little self-consciously, "not that it would be of any interest..." He looked back up at her, hopefully, Rose thought.
"Could I see?" Rose asked.
He beamed. "Well... I've never shown it to anyone before," he said, but he handed the journal over and moved to look over her shoulder.
It was titled "Journal of Impossible Things". Rose smiled at the word "impossible". It seemed to define the Doctor insofar as he was always proving there was no such thing.
The journal was filled with the most exquisite drawings. She ran her fingers over the drawing of the TARDIS console, imagining she could almost feel the controls.
She turned a few more pages, filled with Daleks, Cybermen, and unfamiliar creatures, until she came to a drawing of herself.
"Ah," he stammered. "Yes, well, that's... that's how Rose, the Doctor's Rose, that's how she looks," he explained.
"How futuristic," she teased, taking in the straight, light hair (she assumed it was blonde, but it was difficult to tell in the ink drawing), and the made-up eyes. Rose had missed that face every time she had looked in a mirror over the past two months.
She continued on, marveling at page after page of the Doctor's adventures. She appeared quite often in them, she noticed. Some scenes she recognized, some she'd have to ask him about later. And it was all from the mind of John Smith. He'd been hiding this from her all this time?
John reveled in the look of delight on Rose's face as she looked through the journal. He couldn't believe he'd kept this side of himself a secret for so long. Not when it could make her smile like this.
She turned another page, and John spoke up. "Ah, that's the box, the blue box," he interjected, excitedly. "It's always there. Like a... like a magic carpet. This funny little box that transports me to faraway places."
She didn't laugh. Rose, in her life's mission to never cease in amazing him, only looked fondly at the drawing. "She's beautiful," Rose said.
John was suddenly certain he was falling in love.
Rose turned the page to the many faces of the Doctor. She briefly touched the drawing on the left hand page, the one with the short-cropped hair. John felt a thrill, and a sudden clarity in the recollection of his dreams. That was the only other version of the Doctor he remembered having adventures with Rose. How strange that she should seem to recognize -
"Which one's which?" Rose asked.
"Hmm?" he replied, coming out of his musings.
"Which one's the first?" she clarified, holding up the page to him. "I'm guessin' you're the latest face?" He nodded. "So, who's the oldest - or youngest, I guess?"
He marveled at her. "I'm not really sure," he explained.
He tried to talk through the vague attempts he had made at organizing the dreams.
"I sometimes think," he ventured, "how magical life would be if things like this were true."
"Yeah," Rose agreed.
"Still," he said, with a short, quiet laugh, "it's just a dream."
Rose smiled up at him. "But it's a part of you."
To be continued...
And there you have it, a little glimpse of Rose-rather-that-the-Doctor, possessed by the living sun from "42", as requested :)